Definition
A Latin term from Roman civil law meaning to coerce a person through threats of violence in order to extract money, property, or some other benefit. The act involves exploiting fear — compelling submission not through actual physical force but through the threatened application of it. In classical Roman legal usage, concutere described conduct that today would fall within the conceptual range of extortion or criminal intimidation.
The term does not appear as a technical term of art in Anglo-American common law. Its relevance to English-language legal research is almost entirely historical and comparative — encountered in civil law treatises, Roman law digests, and early modern legal writing that drew on the Corpus Juris Civilis.
Common Confusion
Concutere is closely related in substance to concussio, the Roman civil law noun denoting the offense itself — the extortion or shaking-down achieved through intimidation. Where concutere is the verbal form describing the act of coercing through fear, concussio names the resulting wrong or crime. Researchers encountering either term in the Digest or in early modern treatises should treat them as two faces of the same concept: concutere is the conduct, concussio is the legal category. Neither maps cleanly onto common law extortion, which developed along distinct doctrinal lines.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter concutere almost exclusively in three contexts: (1) direct quotation of or commentary on the Digest, particularly the passages gathered under the title De officio praesidis (Dig. 1.18), where the term appears in the context of provincial governors' duty to suppress extortionate practices; (2) early modern civil law and canon law treatises that catalogue forms of illicit coercion; and (3) comparative legal history scholarship examining the Roman roots of extortion and duress doctrine.
The key research trap is false equivalence. Because concutere involves threats and compelled surrender of something of value, it looks like extortion or duress to modern eyes. But the Roman concept was embedded in a distinct legal structure — one tied to the abuse of official power (the provincial governor context in Dig. 1.18.6.3) as much as to private wrongdoing. Mapping it directly onto common law categories distorts both systems.
For Law Mind corpus researchers working in civil law history or comparative law, the connection runs most productively through the related term concussio and through broader treatments of metus (fear/duress) in Roman law. Researchers working in common law extortion or duress who encounter this term in a footnote or comparative passage can treat it as background color rather than operative doctrine — unless the specific source being analyzed is a civil law jurisdiction or a hybrid system drawing on Roman roots.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole shelf-source entry and is appropriately compact. Burrill traces the word's components (con + quatere, to shake together) and renders the operative meaning as coercing by threats of violence to extort from a person's fears, citing Dig. 1.18.6.3 and Brissonius's De Verborum Significatione — the standard Renaissance-era Latin legal lexicon.
Burrill's entry is adequate for what it is: a gloss of a Roman law term appearing in the Digest. What it does not do, and cannot be expected to do, is connect concutere to the larger architecture of Roman duress doctrine (metus, vis, the actio quod metus causa) or explain why the Dig. 1.18 context locates the conduct in the sphere of official abuse rather than purely private wrongdoing. Researchers wanting fuller treatment must move beyond Burrill to the primary source (the Digest itself) or to modern Roman law scholarship.
No other shelf sources in the current corpus carry entries for concutere. The absence is unsurprising — this is a term that surfaces in specialist civil law dictionaries and Roman law commentaries rather than in general Anglo-American legal reference works.
Jurisdictional Note
Concutere has no operative role in common law jurisdictions. It may appear in the legal literature of civil law systems — particularly those with deep Roman law traditions — and in ecclesiastical or canon law contexts where Roman law terminology was preserved. Researchers working in Scottish, South African, or Louisiana legal history, where Roman-Dutch or Roman-canon influence is strong, have a somewhat higher probability of encountering the term in functional rather than purely historical usage.